Over the past several years, one of the few pieces of hopeful news about global warming has been the annual release of data from Brazil on its rate of Amazon deforestation. Since forests are immense storehouses of carbon, deforestation causes high levels of greenhouse gas emission. Brazil, which contains about 60% of the Amazon forest, is key to those emissions, and over the last six years it has made important progress in reducing its deforestation rate.

Yesterday marked the official start of the Rio+20 pre-meetings, with government negotiators and NGO staff descending on Riocentro convention center (which, despite its name, is some 25 miles from the center of Rio) by the thousands. Read more >

In the US, we are not strangers to seeing politics trump science in the policy arena. As the work of the UCS Scientific Integrity program has demonstrated time and again, legislators and executive officials sometimes ignore or distort science when pushing a particular political agenda. The US does not have a monopoly on steamrolling science however, as the Brazilian Congress recently demonstrated by passing a set of controversial amendments to that nation’s Forest Code, which protects the Amazon and other critically important natural systems, over the protests of the nation’s leading scientific groups.